It’s a changing world. Many of us have been exchange students and fought tedium in a math class, but now they are transplanting educational systems and adopting computer games for learning – as Finnish exports.

On 16 August, Finland’s national broadcaster YLE reported that Minister of Education Krista Kiuru is travelling to Asia to meet Cabinet members in three countries, in support of Finnish exports – in the field of education, excitingly enough.

So, here we are, a country with two national languages. On the one hand we have Finnish, spoken by the majority of the population. On the other there is Swedish, the mother tongue of our national hero Carl Gustav Emil Mannerheim and currently around 300,000 people (5.5 per cent of the population; including). Scattered around the south, southwest and west coast of Finland, Swedish is also the language found on the autonomous group of rocks situated halfway to Sweden, also known as Åland, or Ahvenanmaa.

Familiar to many here in Finland, the companies SodaStream and Ahava are utlising Israeli settlements to manufacture their goods.

After capturing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the War of 1967, Israel quickly started establishing settlements in the newly conquered territory. Israel has created 124 settlements that have been recognised by the Israeli Ministry of Interior and are subsidised by the state of Israel. On top of that, roughly 100 outposts, or settlements that have not been officially recognised, have been created, also with the assistance of government ministries.

Finnish households throw away between 120 and 160 million kg of food every year, an average of 23 kg per person.

STUDIES carried out at the request of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have estimated that between 2010 and 2012, 868 million people (approximately 12 per cent of the world population) were in a condition of undernourishment, not getting a sufficient amount of calories every day. While the figure is decreasing – between 2007 and 2009 it was 867 million and 898 million in 2004-2006 – it appears unlikely that the aim of the First Millennium Development Goal, halving the number of undernourished people by 2015, will be achieved.